As the United States was being drawn inexorably into the
maelstrom of World War II, the ghost of Woodrow Wilson
was in the mind of every person and institution, public or
private, who set out to think about, plan for, or create a new
system of world security to ensure peace and stability in the
postwar period, when the guns would once again fall silent
after the democratic victory. Although by no means assured
until perhaps late 1943, victory was a necessary article of
faith for all who struggled to preserve civilization against
the darkest forces of tyranny in modern history.

Many continued to believe that Wilson's ideals
remained a body of profound political wisdom that could
still light the true path for humankind, despite the
undeniable failure of the League of Nations and the onset
once more of bloody global war. This was the implicit
conviction in Wendell Willkie's best-selling 1943 book, One
World, as well as the principal theme of the 1944 film Wilson,
produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. Also in 1944, Sumner
Welles, who had resigned as Under Secretary of State just a
year before, wrote that it was time to reaffirm the Wilsonian
ideals, which had thrilled his generation "to the depths of
our intellectual and emotional being" and whose realization
was "well within human capacity."

But many others concluded that Wilson's high
principles amounted to a moral code which humans could
never live up to, and which thus led the world into dangerous
delusions of what was possible. Also in 1944, the eminent editor, scholar, and
political columnist Walter Lippmann wrote that Wilson's "supreme spiritual
error" lay in "forgetting that we are men and thinking that we are gods. We
are not gods.... We are mere mortals with limited power and little universal
wisdom." To President Roosevelt and the other leaders of World War II fell
the hard task of searching anew for some workable solution to the human
race's most besetting problem--recurrent, ever more destructive wars.

Wilson's Tragic Rigidity

The Senate's rejection of the League of Nations treaty on March 19, 1920, was
a result of many factors, of which perhaps the most basic was the enduring
American fear and contempt for Europe's continual intrigues and wars. As
most Americans saw it, they had sent their young men to France in 1917 to
fight and die for a worthy cause--"to make the world safe for democracy."
But they had recoiled in disgust and disbelief at the spectacle of greed
displayed by the European victors and embodied in the vengeful Treaty of
Versailles. More direct and immediate reasons for the Senate's rejection of the
League were the personal bitterness between President Wilson and Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge (A-Massachusetts), chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, and the misplaced loyalty of the Democratic Senators to
their party leader in the White House. The primary cause of failure, however,
was the absolute rigidity, rooted in moral and intellectual arrogance, of
Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson had arrived at Brest on December 13, 1918, to overwhelming
acclaim and adulation. Frenzied, cheering crowds welcomed him in every
European country. It was said of him that "no such evangel of peace had
appeared since Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount ... that only
Augustus nineteen centuries before had such an opportunity to create a new
world." In the peace conference at Paris, however, his high-flown
idealism met and was forced to accommodate the hard realities of age-old
feuds, territorial disputes, and the European victors' utter determination for
revenge against the evil Germans who had cost them so much blood and
treasure. But if he was forced to swallow the corrosive Versailles Treaty, he
believed that all could be redeemed by the Covenant of the League of
Nations, which was his creation and which he had sold to the statesmen of
Europe.

Pale and tired, but confident that he could raise American awareness to
the height of his own vision, he returned home on July 8, 1919, determined to
obtain quick Senate ratification of the League treaty. But his laying of the
political groundwork for Senate approval had been negligent, even offensive.
In 1918, he had asked the American people to give him a Congress dominated
by his own party, but the voters had returned Republican majorities to both
houses. Ignoring this political fact, he had included no Republicans of stature
in the U.S. delegation to Paris, implying that he did not consider the GOP to
be a factor in the peace-making. In Paris, he consulted only with himself,
treating even politicians of his own party with suspicion and thinly disguised
disdain. All of this provoked anger and distrust on Capitol Hill.

On July 10, 1919, Wilson went before the Senate to present the League
treaty. His manner was not ingratiating. To his listeners, he was "the schoolmaster
incarnate raised to unthinkable heights from which he flung down not
requests but dictates." He seemed to be saying to the Senators that "as he
had redone the world, so now it was their duty to approve his work and then
be gone." In the press gallery, a journalist named Henry L. Stoddard thought
to himself that "below stood a being utterly suffused with arrogance." In
April, Wilson had announced that the European governments had accepted
several amendments to the League treaty to accommodate American critics.
He considered these appropriate but would go no further. He wanted the
treaty ratified as presented, without a single further amendment. To the
affronted United States Senate, he seemed to be asking for a rubber
stamp.

The changes accepted by the Europeans did not go far enough for the
Republicans. The heart of the problem was Article 10, which they read as
automatically committing each League member to guarantee the territory and
independence of all nations. This was an extreme interpretation, given the
unanimity rule in the League Council (which would permit the United States
to veto any proposed action), but a distrustful Senate wanted tangible
safeguards. Some thoughtful Republicans were seeking a workable
compromise. Elihu Root, a distinguished former Secretary of State, proposed
that the United States exempt itself from the presumption of an automatic
commitment under Article 10. Senator Lodge put forward several additional
reservations, the most important of which was to require prior congressional
approval for the deployment of American armed forces abroad. This
requirement was not inconsistent with the exclusive constitutional power of
Congress to declare war, but it chose to ignore similar presidential powers to
conduct foreign policy and implement U.S. treaty obligations.

A growing number of devoted internationalists, both in the government
and outside it, understood the partisan political realities as well as the
constitutional ambiguities and were prepared to support the Lodge
reservations. For them, the moral and strategic imperative was for the United
States, the most powerful and prestigious democracy, to join the League.
They were confident that time and experience would show that a number of
the commonly expressed fears were exaggerated. It appeared that a majority of
the American people and nearly 80 percent of the Senate supported the
central idea of collective security to prevent future wars.

A Failed Crusade and a Cover-Up

Wilson's political advisers persuaded him to confer with a number of Senators
during the summer, but these talks only confirmed the political fact that he did
not have enough votes to ratify the treaty without further amendments.
Frustrated, but obsessive about protecting the purity of his League Covenant,
Wilson decided that he must go over the heads of the politicians and "take
the issue to the people." In early September he embarked on a grueling
railroad campaign through all but four of the states west of the Mississippi. In
deciding to undertake this trip, he acted against the advice of his doctors,
who were worried that he could not stand the strain of traveling 9,800 miles
between the Canadian and Mexican borders in a jarring railway coach, making
twenty-six major stops and giving ten rear-platform speeches every day. They
worried especially about his ability to withstand the intense late summer dust
and heat in places like the Badlands of South Dakota and the Great Salt
Desert. One of Wilson's closest political aides, Joseph Tumulty, later wrote,
"It needed not the trained eye of a physician to see that the man ... was on
the verge of a nervous breakdown," and he warned the President of the
possibly "disastrous consequences" of making the trip. Wilson replied
that he could not place his personal safety before his duty. He seemed
prepared for martyrdom: "I don't care if I die the next minute after the treaty is
ratified," he told a friendly journalist, who predicted that he would break down
before he reached the Rockies.

His doctors were proved painfully right. Plagued by excruciating
headaches throughout the trip, the President, previously a compelling orator,
began slurring his words and losing the thread of his argument. On
September 25, after a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, he suffered a mild stroke
and was forced to cancel all further plans and return to Washington. Back in
the White House, a second, far more serious stroke on October 1 paralyzed
his entire left side. For several days he could not speak. His condition raised
the urgent question of his capacity to perform his constitutional duties. But
his inner circle, dominated by his doctor, Admiral Cary Grayson, and his
second wife, Edith Galt Wilson, then organized perhaps the most complete
and sustained cover-up in the history of the American presidency. Refusing
to disclose the nature of the President's illness or to acknowledge any
incapacity, they formed an impenetrable defense of his sickroom and issued
vague, reassuring medical bulletins,
while all but the most routine and perfunctory business of government
ground slowly to a halt.

After six weeks, a slightly recovered Woodrow Wilson received Senator
Gilbert Hitchcock (D-Nebraska), the minority leader, on November 18.
Hitchcock informed him that a vote on the League treaty was imminent, and
defeat unavoidable without compromise. Hitchcock said that all of the
prominent men who had been with the President in Paris--Herbert Hoover,
Bernard Baruch, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, even his closest political
adviser, Colonel Edward Mandell House--were for acceptance of the Lodge
reservations. But Wilson's rigidity and political purblindness had been, if
anything, intensified by his physical affliction. "I have no moral right to
accept any change in a paper I have already signed," he said. Then he
dictated a brief letter, taken down in longhand by Edith Wilson and handed to
the Senator; it said, "I hope all true friends of the treaty will refuse to support
the Lodge reservations." He asked Hitchcock to convey this message to all
the Democratic Senators.

The next day, Hitchcock, who lacked any conspicuous qualities of
leadership, read the letter to the Democratic caucus, and fatefully they all
agreed to follow the wishes of their President. Accordingly, that same
afternoon, Democratic votes ensured the defeat of a motion for American
entry into the League with the Lodge reservations. The margin of defeat was
increased by the votes of a handful of "Irreconcilables," extreme isolationists
who were opposed to U.S. participation under any circumstances. A few
minutes later, in a following vote, the same extremists joined with Lodge and
the other reservationists to defeat a motion calling for U.S. entry without the
reservations.

The public outcry at this rejection was surprisingly strong, and the
intensity of the continuing national debate on the treaty suggested that the
Senate might reconsider the matter. The White House received hundreds of
appeals to accept the reservations, but they never reached the President; they
were ignored or left unopened by the palace guard, of which Edith Wilson
had become the undisputed captain. She was not concerned with public
issues, but only with her husband's health. His views were her views and his
wishes were her commands.

A Mind Unhinged

The President remained in extremely precarious health, and his actions gave
increasing indication of a distinctly unbalanced mind. Lord Grey, who had left
Washington after waiting in vain for four months to penetrate Wilson's
sickroom and present his credentials as the British Ambassador, wrote a letter
to the London Times on January 31, 1920, expressing the growing
apprehension in Europe that the United States might not come into the
League. His letter emphasized the vital importance of American participation
and dismissed the reservations as essentially innocuous and unobjectionable.
Edith Wilson carried the letter, which was reprinted in the New York Times on
February 1, to the President's sickroom and came out with a statement he had
dictated and she had written down in her childish scrawl: "Had Lord Grey
ventured upon any such utterance while he was still at Washington as
Ambassador, his government would have been promptly asked to withdraw
him."

In February 1920, Wilson suddenly wrote to his Secretary of State who,
with the knowledge of the palace guard, and indeed of the press and the
general public, had been holding regular Cabinet meetings since October to
keep the wheels of government turning at least in routine orbits. In the letter
he asked, "Is it as true, as I have been told," that Lansing had been holding
these Cabinet meetings? An astonished Lansing replied that of course it was
true, and that the meetings were prompted by a general agreement among
Cabinet members that, being denied communication with the President, it was
"wise for us to confer informally together." Wilson wrote back demanding
Lansing's immediate resignation for an unjustified "assumption of Presidential
authority." Lansing resigned and released the exchange of letters to the
press, which led to the venting of serious questions about the President's
mental state and the honesty of the medical bulletins issued by the White
House. "It is unthinkable that a sane man would offer any objection to the
department heads getting together," said the Worcester (Mass.) Evening
Gazette. A Los Angeles Times headline read, "Wilson's Last Mad Act." The
"act" was almost certainly triggered by Wilson's remembering that Lansing
supported the Lodge reservations.

In a last-ditch effort to save the League treaty from all but certain death,
the President's liaison man in Paris, Ray Stannard Baker, returned to
Washington, and was finally allowed to see Wilson in early March. He pleaded
passionately for the reservations, appealing to the need to put first things first,
but his arguments fell on deaf ears: "If I accept them, these Senators will
merely offer new ones, even more humiliating.... These evil men intend to
destroy the League."

The end came on a second and final Senate vote, on March 19, 1920. This
time twenty-one Democratic Senators disobeyed the President and voted to
accept the Covenant with the Lodge reservations. But the tally fell seven
votes short of the two-thirds required to ratify a treaty. If only seven more
Democrats had mustered the courage to defy their President's self-destructive
stance, the United States would have become a member of the League of
Nations.

The Impact

The refusal of the United States to join the League was without question a
major cause of the League's weakness from the outset. The added weight of
the world's largest democracy would, at the very least, have reassured and
lent courage to Britain and France. But it is by no means certain that U.S.
participation would have prevented Hitler's coming to power, the progressive
erosion of international stability during the 1930s, or the ultimate cataclysm of
World War II. Woodrow Wilson's conviction that the mere presence of the
United States on the League Council would be a decisive deterrent to future
wars rested on the assumption that Congress and public opinion would,
owing to the simple fact of U.S. membership, support strong and consistent
policies to deter or punish aggression--backed by active diplomacy,
economic and political sanctions, and if necessary by overwhelming military
force.

That is a very large assumption. It tends to dismiss, or heavily discount,
Americans' historic sense of separateness and their enduring instinct to avoid
foreign entanglements--an instinct that in 1920 still pervaded hundreds of
small towns "where the paving ended at the limits where the trolley made its
turn-around ... and Europe was strange, foreign, different--bad."

It is also an assumption undermined by what then happened in American
life: a decisive inward turning, and the successive election of three
Republicans--Warren G. Harding in 1920, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and
Herbert Hoover in 1928--whose common denominator was narrow
isolationism. There was also Congress's steady refusal--heedless
or deliberate--to fund the armed forces above a starvation level. Would
Senate ratification have suddenly and decisively transformed the main currents
of American life and greatly enlarged the nation's political willingness to
take a major part in shaping world events between 1920 and 1940? It is and
will remain a question with no certain answer, but the burden of proof is
on the supporters of Woodrow Wilson's idealism.

Wilson himself, although his vision of American leadership of the
League was shattered, stayed on in the White House through the 1920
election, in which the Republican, Harding, defeated the Democratic nominee,
James M. Cox. Still weak and frail, Wilson accompanied Harding to the
inauguration in March 1921 and lived as a private citizen in Washington until
his death in 1924.

Franklin Roosevelt and the League

As the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1920, Franklin Roosevelt made
more than eight hundred speeches in support of the League of Nations.
But in contrast to Wilson, who had emphasized the idealism of the League
idea, Roosevelt argued for it in terms of "practical necessity." He told
audiences at campaign rallies that if the United States did not join the League,
it "would degenerate into a new Holy Alliance" dominated by the European
states. Nor did he share Wilson's uncompromising attitude toward the
Covenant text, but was open to commonsense amendments if these were
needed to make it politically palatable to the U.S. Senate. He repeatedly
argued that it was important not to "dissect the document," but to "approve
the general plan."

During the following two decades, however, even Roosevelt's qualified
enthusiasm for the organization and its relevancy steadily cooled to a point
which intimates described as "glacial." He was disgusted by the ways in
which France and Britain consistently blocked the League's efforts to
respond effectively to aggression and used the League as an instrument of
their own myopic, self-destructive policies. But he also came to believe that
the organization's inherent structure and its rules of procedure were grossly
inadequate to the basic task of safeguarding peace and preventing war.

The Covenant of the League was mainly the creation of Woodrow
Wilson and reflected a soaring idealism rooted in the philosophical premise
that there could and must be genuine equality in relations among the sovereign
nations of the world. It provided for: an Assembly, composed of
representatives from all member nations, with each member having one vote;
a Council, composed of one permanent representative from the United States,
Britain, France, Italy, and Japan (known as the Principal Allied and
Associated Powers), plus four nonpermanent members to be elected by the
Assembly; and a Permanent Secretariat.

League members were obligated by the Covenant's preamble "not to
resort to war" and to conduct "open, just and honorable relations" with all
other nations. Great emphasis was placed on the peaceful arbitration of
disputes and, after 1924, on the referral of contentious issues to the new
Permanent Court of International Justice, located at the Hague. But League
members were obligated to preserve "the territorial integrity and political
independence" of all nations, whether League members or not, against
"external aggression," and it was the duty of the Council to "advise upon the
means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled" (this was the controversial
Article 10). If negotiation and arbitration failed to resolve an international
problem, and a member nation resorted to war in disregard of the Covenant, it
would be deemed an act of war against all League members, who would
immediately impose financial and trade sanctions. If such sanctions proved
insufficient to halt the aggression, it would be the duty of the Council to
recommend that member governments contribute effective army, naval, or air
forces to carry out "enforcement by common action of international
obligations."

This sounded like an impressive armory of collective responses, but a
fatal weakness lay in the unanimity rule, which flowed directly from Wilson's
belief in the necessity for the sovereign equality of member nations. The
Council could therefore respond to situations of external aggression only by
unanimous decision (Article 5). Moreover, whatever might be the normal
prospect for unanimous agreement to act against aggression, it was fatally
compromised by a provision that any member nation whose interests were
affected by the matter under discussion was permitted to sit with the Council
as a member thereof--and thus to cast a vote (Article 4). This meant that an
aggressor nation could sit with the Council and veto proposed sanctions
against itself. The Council's only recourse was to expel the aggressor from the
League, which happened in the cases of Japan and Italy. As later events
proved, the League was paralyzed by the unanimity rule, which could have
been changed only by the determined unity and vigor of the major democracies.
Because the United States was not a member, and Britain and France were
irresolute, the League could not cope with the rise of aggressive dictatorships
driven by revenge and quite prepared to flaunt all forms of international law.

In 1923, Franklin Roosevelt, as a private citizen, developed a "Plan to
Preserve World Peace" for a competition for the American Peace Award
sponsored by the Saturday Evening Post. Its most notable feature was the
proposal to eliminate the League Covenant's requirement for unanimity in
decisions involving sanctions and the use of collective force. "Common
sense," he wrote, "cannot defend a procedure by which one or two
recalcitrant nations could block the will of the great majority." On the
basis of his political instincts and his own direct experience, Roosevelt
accordingly approached the problem of securing peace and stability after
World War II as a thoroughly disenchanted Wilsonian idealist. He had
become an advocate and exponent of realpolitik.